


Not the Plan at All

by aurora b (leavemelight)



Category: The Voice (US) RPF
Genre: F/M, Shefani - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2016-02-21
Packaged: 2018-05-09 04:05:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 14,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5524769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leavemelight/pseuds/aurora%20b
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A linear, if fragmented, story of saving each other. And going bravely beyond.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. TM Something

**Author's Note:**

> Though this is largely based on the well-known facts that any self-respecting Shefani fan is familiar with from snippets of interviews and an embarrassing/entirely proper amount of gossip site articles, many things, especially when it comes to timelines and backgrounds and such are also completely random and from the top of my head. Which might be a good thing, I tell myself, as it maybe, possibly, makes this RPF thing (and, specifically, me writing it) a bit less creepy.

All these months later she still finds herself bursting into tears at the most random stuff. The crying used to be a relief and then it became a distraction and now she is pretty much resigned to the fact that it can be triggered by almost anything (Apollo’s toys on the living-room floor, car-insurance commercials on TV, wind creating ripples on the back-yard pool), but is all but guaranteed when she hears her own music on the car radio. And maybe that is not even all that random, because the songs inevitably remind her either of happier times or of the utter shitstorm that this past year has been.

Pulling into the studio parking lot that morning, she makes a valiant effort to get herself together before opening the car door. The teary hiccups persist stubbornly, though, and eventually she figures that she’s better off trying to make it to her trailer unseen rather than get caught hysterically sobbing into the wheel of her SUV. If watching countless music videos has taught her anything, it’s that there is something powerful and dramatic (if maybe a bit traffic-hazardy) about people crying while they are driving; crying alone in a stationary car in a near-empty parking lot is just depressingly sad. 

Except that, pouring out of her car, she runs smack into Blake who has had the misfortune to arrive to his assigned parking spot just moments earlier. A fleeting look of utter horror passes his face and she can’t really blame him, because her make-up is probably running all over the place and she can’t seem to catch a proper breath.

Before she can do or say anything to let him off the hook and get on with his day, Blake’s expression changes and he takes a few quick long strides closer to her, pulling her into a massive, all-encompassing bear-hug. Her wet cheek comes into contact with his plaid-covered chest and her arms, completely of their own volition, wind around his body, and then they just stand there, alone in the middle of the sunny parking lot. A few more huge sobs wrack themselves though her, the surprise of the warm physical contact having already stopped the flow of tears, and then it’s over.

She takes a deep breath, expecting him to release her now that he has taken care of the crazy, but he doesn’t, giving her the lead.

“You’ve lost weight,” she mumbles into his shirt, weirdly reluctant to let go, and when a laughter rumbles through his chest she is glad that she hadn’t. He has lost weight, though, she just wouldn’t have noticed how much if she wasn’t folded around him like she is at the moment.

“Yeah,” he contends. “Went on a bourbon diet there for a while.”

She leans back a bit to look at his face and he shrugs down at her. Yeah, that makes sense. From what she has been reading, in her daily paranoid perusal of celebrity gossip sites and magazines, his year has not been much to write home about, either. They last met a month and a half ago, during the home stretch of the blind auditions at the beginning of July and the crazy thing is, back then she had not noticed a thing amiss about him. Now, given, she had been a bit busy trying to keep her own shit together and a smile plastered on her face, but a few weeks later his marriage was done and now he’s already been divorced for a month and she finds herself impossibly jealous of him for that.

“You okay?” he asks, lifting one hand to rub her shoulder.

She gives him a teary smile and nods. “I am, thanks. For now, anyway.” 

Finally letting go of him and stepping back, she notices a big wet mascara stain smack in the middle of his left breast pocket. Instinctively reaching out to rub at it, her eyes widen in horror.

“Oh, God. I owe you a shirt. I’m so sorry.“ She gives up on the stain, stuffing her hands in the back pockets of her jeans instead. “I was actually trying to make a run for it, hoping I could reach my trailer before traumatizing anyone.”

Blake steps out of her way and gestures towards the trailers, stacked neatly next to each other a bit further away.

“Nothin’ to apologize for,” he drawls, placing his palm gently to her back and walking them both in the direction he’d indicated. “You have no idea how many of Adam’s fancy shirts I got mascara stains on back in July. It’s a pay-it-forward kind of a thing.”

She can’t help but laugh out loud at that. Somewhere in the back of her mind there is a thought that these kinds of mood-fluctuations cannot possibly be healthy, but she chooses to ignore it, because for some reason, in what seems like forever, she is not feeling utterly miserable.

He must still be worried about her, though, because he doesn’t leave her at the doorway, instead walking into the trailer with her, leaning against the door after he closes it.

“You’re gonna have to be careful with the tears in front of me, though,” he muses and she squints at him, trying to figure out where this is going. “I might be all cleaned up and gentrified now, so it might be hard to believe this of me,“ a dimple appears in his cheek, letting her know that he is not being all too serious, “but I am still a Southern country boy at heart and we just can’t handle seein’ a beautiful woman sad and cryin’. Does funny things to us, makes us want to punch something. Preferably the person responsible for the tears, but sometimes the nearest wall will do. God knows what the tabloids would make of a cast on my hand right now.”

She gives him a thankful smile, appreciative of both his attempt to make her smile and his readiness to deal a punch for her in necessary. All this, plus something that she recognizes in the look of his eyes makes her want to be more candid with him than she has been with anyone in a long while. She’s been so careful about what she says to whom, near paranoid about any leaks but, looking at him now, all concerned and honorable and knowing, the mere thought that he might do anything that would hurt her seems ridiculous. 

“At the risk of you running off to dole out Southern justice,” she says with a wry smile, “this,” she points at her face, “this is not sadness. I’m pretty sure the last of that went the day Gavin finally admitted to the affair with the nanny. Whose naked pictures, by the way, I found on my son’s iPad.”

“Jesus,” he exclaims, seating himself on the corner of the dresser.

The corner of her lips lifts in a self-deprecating smile. “TMI?”

Blake’s eyebrows lift. “Well, TM something.”

“Yeah, so this,“ she now turns to assess the tear-damage from the mirror, “is pure anger. And some parts embarrassment, I would even go so far as to say mortification. Because my husband of 13 years has turned me into a Hollywood cliché.”

He nods. “Havin' become a bit of a Nashville cliché just a short while ago, something I can empathize with.” 

She grabs a damp tissue from a box in the drawer and fixes her face the best she can.

“The day that the Ben Affleck nanny story broke,” she says, absently, as if speaking to herself, ”I think I scared my housekeeper half to death. Even I couldn’t tell you right now whether I was laughing or crying, reading those TMZ headlines, but I was doing it so hysterically that I am sure she was this close,” she indicates with a half-inch space between her neatly manicured fingers, “to having me hauled off to a looney bin.”

They share a long look. There isn’t really much to say to that. Life takes abrupt, absurd turns, sweeping the carpet out from under you in the most unexpected ways and all you can do is react. And keep reacting, in lieu of just taking up a fetal position on your bed and giving up on everything.

“You want to see a picture of her?” she suddenly asks with a wry smile.

His eyebrows rise again, even higher, if possible.

“Oh, no, not THAT picture,” she laughs. “It is probably forever burned into my retinas, but I’m pretty sure I’ve managed to scrub it from all the other places that I might ever come into contact with. No, I meant, like, a random run-of-the-mill, walking down the street, paparazzi picture. I promise you, it will be worth it.”

Blake tilts his head. “Ok, now you’ve gotten me a bit curious.”

Getting out her phone, she does a quick Google image search, then silently hands it to Blake. He looks at what is on the screen, then up at her, then frowns and turns his gaze back down at the screen.

“At the risk of repeatin’ myself,” he drawls out slowly, “Jesus!” Slightly struggling for words, he mumbles, “It’s like it’s you… but like a cheap knock-off version.”

“Yep,” she nods, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. “In hindsight, I was, indeed, totally, unwittingly Single White Femaled by my own nanny. I can’t really understand why that did not send all the world’s alarm bells ringing, but I am sure there is, like, a teachable moment hidden in there somewhere.”

Rubbing at his eyes with the heel of his palm, he sighs, “Yeah, can’t claim that this thought has not passed my mind lately, but all I can say is that there must be an easier way to learn things. One that would not, ya know, run the serious risk of killin’ you dead in the process.”

Gwen reaches out her hand and pats his knee in sympathy, then turns to inspect her reflection in the vanity mirror.

“It’s just weird,” she says, frowning. “Cause marriages end all the time, for all sorts of reasons, but it really never occurred to me that mine would. And I don’t really know why that is. Thinking back now, even before the whole nanny thing, there were these… calling them warning signs would be a major understatement… things just screaming in my face to get the fuck out and I didn’t,” she chances a quick glance back up at him and finds him listening intently. “Because when you’re married you work things out. Because you’ve promised to. And because you have made these three kind, beautiful, smart boys together. So you think you have to do whatever it takes to make it work, compromise where necessary, negotiate, whatever.”

It’s hard to not get nostalgic along with these kinds of trains of thought. To not miss the days of naïve ignorance when everything was safely black and white and she had this single-minded confidence that tomorrow would be just as good as yesterday had been. That whatever she’d been building for years was meant to last.

“And then,” she lets out a sad chuckle, ”something like this happens, and you are left wondering who the fuck is this guy standing in front of you. Cause, like, it sure as hell isn’t the man you married all those years ago. Cause that man would never have betrayed you like this and then tried his damnest to lie and squirm and browbeat his way out of it. Try to make you feel guilty about it, instead of accepting any responsibility for his own actions.”

Now it’s Blake who reaches out and swipes his thumb comfortingly along her shoulder. Gwen turns her head to look at his outstretched hand, takes a quick deep breath and shrugs.

“So here we are now. This was not my plan at all. And I am clearly better off. But I think it’s going to take a while for it to start feeling that way. Thus the tears at random things.” Suddenly she remembers the flash of helpless horror on Blake’s face when he first saw her at the parking lot and her laughter is genuine. “And I mean, like, truly weird random things.”

Taking her cue, he smiles. “So, what was it this time?”

“Oh, the thing that gets me every time,” she admits. “But I feel dumb and egomaniacal even thinking about it, let alone saying it out loud.”

“Come on,” Blake goads, “I’ll bet you I am more dumb at any given moment.”

Gwen relents. She thinks it must be those dimples he flashes at her. “Fine. My own music on the car radio.”

“Pfft,” he scoffs, “that’s not random. That’s a real thing.”

“Ah, that’s right,” she suddenly realizes who it is she is talking to. “You are uniquely qualified to understand that one, aren’t you?”

“Well, I don’t quite become a slobberin' heap like some,” he teases, “but it is a distraction alright. Cause even if those songs aren’t about her, they’re still very firmly connected to those times.”

“Right?” Gwen squints. “I’ve even tried to find ways to avoid my songs. Like, talk radio, but, you know, with the world clearly going to hell, that didn’t really help my mood much.”

Pushing himself up, Blake chuckles at that. Gwen gets an oddly teasing glint in her eyes.

“I’ve also dabbled in country stations,” she admits, now beaming at him openly, “which would work as, for some strange reason, they never play my music, but then, like, some particularly fitting wailing “my love done me wrong” song comes on and I am just about ready to wrap my car around the nearest tree again. So, I am mainly back to Top40,” she shrugs, “which is mostly upbeat and I have not had that many hits lately, so what are the odds?”

“Better than you would have figured?” he offers.

“Yeah. Damn my longevity.” She thinks for a moment. “Weirdly enough, his music doesn’t get me crying, it just gets me…”

“… pissed off?”

”You too, huh?” she asks, tilting her head.

He nods. “Somethin’ like that.”

For a moment they just hold each other’s gaze, knowing smiles playing on their lips. Then he glances at the trailer door, bites his lip and looks back at her.

“I’d better get goin’ before they raise the alarm. You gonna be okay?”

“Yeah,” she says, and he could swear that the smile she beams at him is making the small room noticeably brighter, “of course. Sooner or later, right?”

“Right,” he agrees and opens the door to leave.

“Hey, Blake,” she yells after him. One foot already on the stairs outside, he turns. “Thanks. For… you know, all of it. Send me the dry-cleaning bill.”

He nods, showing his appreciation, then swipes his hand at her in dismissal and closes the door behind him.


	2. That kind of a cowboy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's Blake's turn to get saved a little

She comes to the door herself, opening it wide for him while still talking on the phone. 

“Look… I just don’t understand why you would want to open that up again. I thought if there was one thing we agreed on…”

She gives Blake an apologetic look and gestures for him to enter. It’s obviously Gavin on the other end and Blake feels like he is seriously intruding on something too private for him to witness. He remembers those kinds of conversations well – not once had they ended on a pleasant, civilized note.

“Should I…?” he mouths to her, gesturing towards his truck parked on the driveway. Gwen shakes her head emphatically and waves him in.

“Could we please just drop it for now?” she says into the phone. “I’ll see you tomorrow evening. Try to make sure that Kingston reads the book he has with him… No, Jesus, I was just reminding you just in cas… Nevermind. I have to go, Blake’s here.” He can hear Gavin’s sneer through the back of her iPhone. Gwen rolls her eyes, “I am not even going to dignify that with a reaction, Gavin. And you don’t have a foot to stand on when in comes to that subject.” She switches the call off without saying goodbye.

Taking a deep breath, she looks up at him, rubbing at her temple.

“Sometimes I am so jealous of you for your nice little divorce,” she blurts out. Blake’s eyebrows pretty much disappear under his hairline at that kind of a greeting. 

As soon as the words leave her lips, Gwen looks absolutely mortified, her hands flying in front of her mouth and eyes suddenly as big as saucers.

“Oh my God, I am so sorry!” she exclaims. “That was so unbelievably mean. I am not a mean person. Well, except right after a phone call with the soon-to-be ex, it seems. Can you please forgive me?”

To that he can’t help but laugh. Gwen usually seems so put together and thought out that when she gets these bursts of uncensored, almost childlike sincerity, it still pretty much always catches him completely off-guard. And it’s all the more disconcerting because now that they have been spending more time together, he is starting to realize that the unguarded emotional responses to things are actually her default mode. And that he finds that sort of sunny openness to life utterly adorable.

“Nah, it’s ok,” he says, running his hand through his hair. “I guess the actual filin’ and signin’ part of it was pretty smooth sailin’. Which is not to say that we got there quite without those kinds of phone calls.”

He follows her into the bright sunlit kitchen of the house. She’s barefoot, a baggy white tank top stuffed haphazardly into loose jeans that hang low on her hips, the cuffs rolled up above her ankles and her shiny blonde hair in a messy bun on top of her head, and it kind of bends Blake’s mind a little bit how someone can look so relaxed and domestic and still so punk rock at the same time. The apologetic but bright smile she flashes up at him does little to lessen the discrepancy.

“Right now each and every single conversation we have just devolves with an almost magical speed into what you just heard,” she sighs. “He isn’t really jealous of you or, well, anybody, cause for that he’d have to care or, you know, be in any way invested in our personal relationship. It’s about control and losing it and the kids and maintaining his relationship with them, though I really have no intention of keeping them apart…”

“Well, we didn’t have any kids and at the time when we got married we were both obviously goin’ places so a prenup was a no-brainer, really. Plus, I’d been married before and I think that kind of served as a warnin’ example, for both of us. So, once it was clear that it was over, it really was just a matter of walkin’ over to the county clerk’s office.”

“What happened, though?” she asks, a little frown creating a crease between her eyes. “I mean, I saw you guys in, like, winter? And you seemed so…,” she is struggling to find a fitting word, “together? Like, in love, even?” When he doesn’t answer right away, instead looking to the side, she does a little startled jump and puts a hand on his forearm. “Oh, my God. I am doing it again. I’m like an elephant in a china shop today, aren’t I? Disregard all those stupid questions, please.”

And again, even through the awkwardness of the situation, when Blake turns his gaze back at her, he can’t help but smirk. She’s a bright ball of energy, just standing there, toned arms flailing about as she tries to convey her mortification. 

This, noting all these minutiae about somebody, about a woman, is not something new and unfamiliar to him, but it hasn’t really happened in a long, long while. It is not at all an unpleasant feeling, like getting back vital pieces of yourself that you had given up on retrieving ever again. So all these little gut punches that Gwen keeps unwittingly dealing him this morning, he doesn’t really mind them that much. Two months ago they’d probably have made him want to crawl into a bottle of whiskey and die; now they are making him feel more alive.

“Can I get you something to drink?” she gestures to the large fridge in the corner. “I think I might even have beer, but it’s probably some fancy foreign microbrewery thing.” To his doubting raised eyebrow she answers, “I have very pretentious friends,” and lets out a little giggle.

“Are you havin’ anything?” He has, to his own total dismay, lost the taste for alcohol lately, but would be willing to hug a bottle to keep her company.

She shakes her head, the high bun on top of her head wobbling. “Nah. I try to refrain from daydrinking. It seems too much like another step towards becoming a desperate and bitter middle-aged divorcee.”

“Then no, I’m good,” he says. “And for the record, you are in absolutely no danger of becomin’ any of those things.” After a moment’s pause he amends, “Except for the ‘divorcee’ part, of course. I suppose that one can’t, and really, all things considered, shouldn’t be helped anymore.”

She grabs a couple of bottles of water from the fridge and then waves him along as she opens the French doors that lead to the pool. In anticipation of his question she explains,

“I thought we’d go to the studio. It’s back there, we converted the pool house a while back. A bit further away from the house where, at any given moment, any number of kids could be taking a nap. Neither of our music really qualifies as soothing lullabies.”

His cowboy boots are clicking loudly on the concrete of the back yard, in heavy contrast of the delicate slapping of Gwen’s bare feet, and at moments like these he really does feel like a Sasquatch. Gwen glances over her shoulder and notices his ungainly attempt at tiptoeing. She first lets out a giggle and then just gives up, throwing her head back and laughing out loud.

“Want me to lend you some flip-flops?” she gets out in between peals of laughter.

He tries to throw her a stern, disapproving look, but thinks he probably fails miserably as he can practically feel the corners of his lips touching his ears. So he just shakes his head and chuckles,

“I ain’t that kind of a cowboy.”

It takes him a moment to realize what gives the small cozy studio a bit of an unfinished feel. At some point, fairly recently, there has obviously been a bit more stuff on the walls. There are a few poster-sized gaps and empty nails where those framed records must have hung that labels give out to mark sales success. Into one of these empty spaces someone has crudely taped a picture that has been so heavily doctored with a black magic marker that if he didn’t have a strong suspicion that it is the pinched, brooding face of Gavin Rossdale under there, he’d be hard-pressed to recognize him.

“Yeah,” Gwen says, scratching the back of her head, “I can’t really pull stuff like that in the house with all the little eyes looking on, but it’s almost embarrassing how therapeutic these kinds of art projects have been. I have so many of them by now that I could open an exhibition pretty soon.”

He shrugs. “Nah, I was just thinkin’ that I need to look in on gettin’ some art and posters and stuff for my walls back in Oklahoma. There are some… pretty similarly shaped empty spaces back there.”

The cream-colored sofa in the middle of the room is treacherously low, so he sits down on it a bit more heavily than he had intended. For a moment he contemplates the water bottle that she hands him, then looks up at her with a thoughtful frown.

“To answer your question from back there. About what happened.” It’s been some time now, so maybe he is finally ready to put it into words. Into sentences that make some sort of a sense, not only to other people but to himself as well. _Or maybe_ , he glances around the walls again, _with her he doesn’t have to make sense._ Maybe she will understand anyway.

“Oh, no,” she quickly slides her palm over his shoulder, then takes a seat on the other end of the sofa, curling her feet under her. “You really don’t have to. I just still sometimes get so caught up trying to wrap my mind around my own stuff, around what the hell happened to my life that I lose my filter.”

“Still,” he sighs, showing that he doesn’t mind, “to answer your question. Love was not the thing that was missin’ for Miranda and I. In fact, I’m pretty sure a part of me will always love her, at least a little bit. And I still think that she is hot as hell,” his smile is not a happy one. “Back when the split hit the press everyone and their mother was sure that it was me cheatin’ or it was her cheatin’, but that’s just one way to break up a marriage. It sure as hell doesn’t help, but it doesn’t have to be the reason either. It can just be a result. Or a symptom.”

He takes a sip from his water bottle and, looking up, finds Gwen listening to him intently, a smile, patient and understanding and somehow sad, on her lips. So he resolves to just keep speaking, himself a bit curious about what will come out. Her presence just somehow makes it feel… safe to say these things, whatever they might end up being.

“By the end all the love in the world could not change the fact that we were just toxic to each other.” The introspection makes him purse his lips together for a moment. Absentmindedly, he picks on the label of the water bottle in his hand. “We drank too much and then we picked stupid fights. We did stuff to deliberately hurt each other just to get a reaction out of the other one. The result was that Miranda kept writin’ those “angry woman grabs a shotgun” songs and I,” he puffs out loudly, “I couldn’t write much anything at all.”

“That happened to me as well,” she commiserates from her end of the sofa. “I felt like I was choking, all this mess inside of me and nothing coming out. And it’s always been kind of an escape – when all else fails, I can still go and put together a song.”

“Well,” he contends, tilting his head to the side, “in my case that part of it wasn’t quite as existential as that – most of my hits, I haven’t been writin’ them myself for years, anyway. But now, during these last few months, I have been writin’ up a storm and that, I think, says quite a lot on its own.”

Gwen smiles to that. “We’re going to have to compare our break-up songs some time. They’ve been pouring out of me as well, though some of them are really too angry and petty, you know… revengy, for general consumption.”

“Yeah,” he perks up a that. “We should exchange them and make a record of each other’s angry, revengy break-up songs.” Blake chances a look at Gavin’s disfigured image on the wall and can only imagine what that same expression of emotion in song form might be like. Something pretty raw and personal, from the looks of it.

“So,” he takes a deep breath and looks back at her, “to come back to the original question – we just lost something pretty essential along the way. And sometimes I feel like a loser, like a complete failure for not bein’ able to get it back.” His arm has been stretched out on the backrest of the sofa and suddenly he can feel Gwen reaching out and entwining her fingers with his and when he catches her gaze a moment later, it is not pity he sees in her eyes but what can only be described as solidarity. So Blake presses forward.

„I mean, on one hand, it’s kinda hard not to see myself as the common denominator here,” he shrugs. “I am 39 years old and twice divorced. If you’d have told me that was the way things were gonna work out when I was twenty, twenty-three, I would probably have shot you.” A goofy self-deprecating smile plays on his lips, but she can feel his fingers tightening around hers. “On the other hand, I mean, I might be a loudmouth drunkard, but it seems to me that even I deserve the chance to build up a life that would make me happy. Or, at least, you know, content.”

“And what would that life be like?” she asks.

“Well, based on this past year, I am almost tempted to say hell if I know. Life’s been kinda piling up the other stuff, ya know. But generally…,” there’s a thoughtful frown on his face, “I am a pretty independent guy and that means that the woman I am with needs to be pretty independent as well. She can’t be hangin' onto my coat-tails starin' up at me lookin’ for me to tell her which way to turn. And that means that the relationship relies completely on trust. And I’m not sayin’ that Miranda did all the trust-breakin’ in our relationship, hell, in my first marriage I was by far the bigger asshole.” 

This is something that he has given a lot of thought to during this whole time, from the days it started to seriously fall apart, up until this very moment when the slender fingers of this delicate, strong woman feel like a God damn lifeline, like a beacon guiding him to safer shores. 

Listening to himself, learning to tell emotions apart from each other has been an uncharacteristically adult thing for him to do. Figuring out that an abundance of one does not make up for the lack of another. Love and lust and jealousy and trust and anger and hurt have all been thrown in there and mixed up and impulse control has never really been his strong suit in life, but at some point he realized that unless he stopped for a moment and took stock of things, he’d just be tying himself up in ever tighter knots. In the end, the answer seemed to be surprisingly simple. He now tries to put it into words.

“The thing is… I mean, love changes, doesn’t it? Not necessarily into something better or worse, but over time, what you need from each other becomes different from what it was when you first started out. So, if you don’t feel it quite as strongly, if it’s not quite as overwhelmin’ as it used to be, well, that does not necessarily spell doom, right? It’s still there, right? And it’s still important.” He searches Gwen’s eyes, making sure that she is still keeping up with his train of thought. “With trust, it seems to me you either have it or you don’t. You can’t slightly trust somebody. Or if you can, a little trust is not something you build a relationship on.”

“And you certainly can’t have a marriage like that,” she concurs.

They keep their fingers attached in the ensuing thoughtful silence. The fact that she understood him so easily tells him that he must be on the right path. 

“You think if we’d analyze shit this thoroughly when things are good we could keep them from gettin’ so bad?” Blake asks with a wry smile. “Or would that simply be dumpin’ on things that really don’t need dumpin’ on and we should leave things that work, for whatever reason, well enough alone?” 

Lifting Gwen’s knuckles to his lips, he brushes a gentle kiss on them, then lets go.

Deliberately straightening on the sofa, he asks, “Now, what was the reason you asked me over in the first place? Something about advice with the show?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Getting saved is complicated business isn't it? Thank you all for keeping up. I have found that the kudos and especially the comments, are a very good motivating factor.


	3. Blank space, baby

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This, I believe, is called inching.

By the time Adam excuses himself and gets up from the dinner table (something about e-mails and Skype appointments), they have been at it for hours. There’s been laughter and teasing and brainpicking about music and gossiping and it’s clear that whoever is in charge of casting the coaches for the show should go into matchmaking, cause here they are, two contrasting Californians in a cowboy’s dining room in the middle of Oklahoma, and the level of connection is off the charts.

All four of them had flown off to New York together to do promo for the new season on Fallon and then Pharrell had stayed behind to do his own stuff. And then, when Blake said that he had to make a pit stop in Oklahoma on the way back, well, it is quite possible that Gwen and Adam had invited themselves along. Cause Gavin had the kids for a few more days anyway and Adam kept telling absolutely hilarious hillbilly-adventure stories from his previous visits, which usually ended with one or more of his expensive designer clothes ruined and occasionally with a minor injury. Looking at Gwen, laughing so hard in the corner of the Tonight Show dressing room couch that he’d been afraid she’d pull a muscle, Blake hadn’t quite understood how he hadn’t come up with the idea of asking them along himself and the next chance he got, he’d phoned up his part-time housekeeper and asked her to get a few of the guestrooms ready. Because Adam’s his best friend and, lately, it sometimes feels like he lives for those infectious peals of laughter of hers.

The dinner table is covered in empty plates and glasses and platters and bowls with various leftovers and when Blake gets up to carry the mess off to the kitchen, so does Gwen, fully intending to help him. Decisively, Blake plucks the dirty plate out of her hand, pours some wine into her glass and hands it to her, declaring,

“No guest of mine will ever be doin’ chores in this house.”

She slides her eyes over the table, “But we managed to get so many dishes dirty…”

“I believe there is a machine in the kitchen, the sole purpose of which is takin’ care of exactly this type of a situation,” he smirks. “Go relax somewhere, I’ll be right along.” When she still looks doubtful, he adds, “Go on, I get the dishes done a lot faster when pretty women do not distract me with their presence.” Laughing, she finally acquiesces. 

She wanders through the large hall and into the living room, slides her fingernail slowly along the backs of the records lining a whole wall (the country and bluegrass and even classic rock she expected, the massive amount of 80’s pop music is a bit of a surprise, but then she remembers his masterful lipsyncing to Taco last year and is not so surprised anymore, about any of it). The living-room itself looks cozy and down-to-earth enough, but it’s the porch outside the glass doors, bathed in soft lantern light, that catches her eye. Gwen goes back to the hallway, grabs her jacket and then heads out with her wine glass in hand.

This is where Blake finds her about 20 minutes later, leaning on the railing, deep in thought. He takes a moment to admire her form through the door. The past month has not been easy for her, what with the pending divorce and trying to keep things together for the kids, but also work, both at the show and with her own music. 

He’s heard the rough cut of her new single, it’s just as raw and personal as he thought it would be. He’s not sure whether the chills he got from it are because it’s Gwen’s pain that he was hearing or whether it was a stark reminder of his own. And sometimes he catches himself from the realization that they have become so close by now that Gwen’s pain somehow is his own. 

But, even through all of that, she is clearly healing. The sun is coming back into her eyes, she’s quicker to find things that she can laugh out loud at and he has even caught her finding the genuinely funny in how her own life has been going. Not the slightly bitter absurd irony of when she showed him the pictures of the lookalike nanny that day back in August, but the happy absurd of life going on no matter what. She seems to be getting through this period of her life with considerably less self-destruction than he had, but then again, he could afford to be a selfish drunken heap of misery and self-pity for a month. Gwen has three little boys to get through this situation as unscathed as possible, one of them so tiny that you can’t even try to explain all the upheaval to him with words.

He grabs an afghan from a basket next to the door and steps out quietly, trying not to startle her. Hearing the click of the door, she turns her face towards him and gives him a soft, shy smile.

“It’s so quiet out here,” she says, eyes wide in wonder.

He nods. “It is, yeah. One of my favorite parts about this place. You want me to leave you alone?”

A serene smile still on her lips, Gwen shakes her head vehemently and beckons for him to join her at the railing. Stepping eagerly closer, Blake wraps the afghan in his hand over her shoulders and then leans in next to her, their elbows close but not touching.

She looks up at him, bumps his arm with hers and mouths “Thank you.” It hasn’t gone unnoticed by Gwen how perceptive he is of her, she’s just wondering whether she is starting to notice it more or whether he is actually becoming increasingly perceptive. It’s not coddling, he knows that she is perfectly capable of taking care of herself, it’s just little things that make her feel seen and important. 

She’s been on survival mode for such a long time now, not being able to afford falling apart for longer than a few hours at a time and playing by the ear about how she is feeling at any given moment and what she can do to get those feelings validated so that they wouldn’t start to fester inside of her. Given the share of her days that she has had to put on a good face, to slap on the makeup and the flashy smile, for the boys, for the press, for her job (for the soccer moms at King’s school; for the waiters at restaurants), she is fully aware of the danger of getting caught in this fake world and losing herself altogether.

It’s only this past month that she is slowly starting to come up for air, starting to recognize that though her own life has changed beyond recognition, the world around her hasn’t really all that much – there are still so many awesome opportunities to do and see and feel things. And so many rad, lovely people around her who care and want to help, but even more – people who she just enjoys sharing her days with, who make her life richer and fuller with their mere existence.

And one of them, arguably one of the most important ones, is now standing next to her, glancing into the vast Oklahoma night and then turning his gaze at her. It still amazes her how eyes that blue can also be that warm and now that they are so up close to her, she kind of gets stuck in that thought for a moment and only manages to shake out of it when Blake lets out a little cough.

“How ya doin’?” he asks, his expression such that Gwen doesn’t doubt his genuine interest.

The question is so direct that she has to consider it for a moment. “I don’t know,” she admits and comes to a slightly surprising conclusion. “Pretty great, I think. I mean, look at me. What do I have to complain about? Good friends, good wine,” she raises her nearly empty glass, “my health, my music, my family. Even the divorce thing is starting to take shape.”

“Good,” he smiles and rubs his palm up and down her arm. “I’m happy for you. The fact of it is a bitch on its ownsome, of course, but once it’s done you can start to really move on with your life.”

“Yeah,” she agrees. “It’s crazy, I sometimes feel like I am lining up my horses at the starting line, ready to burst out the moment everything is signed. Like I am not only and exclusively dealing with the consequences of this last year anymore, but starting to prepare for the future. Like, I am so ready for what comes next, whatever it might be, I just have to wait out these final moments.” She takes a big breath and admits, “It’s just that… all things considered, I feel a bit like I am sitting on a ticking time bomb here.”

“Why’s that?” Blake frowns, trying to understand.

“It would be hella naïve of me to hope that the doppelganger nanny thing won’t come out, or that if it does in the foreseeable future, it will not be front page news for every gossip rag and “celebrity”,” she sets aside the wine glass she is still clutching to do air quotes, “site out there.”

He shrugs, trying to find the bright side to this eventuality. “They would crucify him. I know from experience that they are just itchin’ to crucify one of you, not really carin' which one. Might serve him right.”

Gwen shakes her head and sighs. “I’d be lying if I said that I haven’t thought about anonymously outing him to the tabloids myself.” To that Blake lets out a laugh. She looks up at him and can’t help a cheeky smile herself. “But then I remember that unfortunately I am a fully grown adult and somebody’s mother and if this whole thing has not been enough to send them all into years of therapy, finding out from the cover of a magazine that a lady at the next table in a café is reading that their father banged their nanny, somebody they implicitly trusted and cared about, will surely do the trick.”

“Yeah,” he agrees. “To tell the truth, I would also recommend not leakin'. That way you at least know that most of the bullshit they print is bound to be absolute fantasy, which makes it easier to just totally ignore it. Or at least try to. In the summer somebody actually took a picture of some crap that was piled up in front of this very house waitin’ to be picked up and spun a whole lot of yarn about how I’d thrown Miranda’s stuff out in some drunken jealous rage, right out of a Taylor Swift video.”

“And actually?” Gwen now turns her whole body towards him, curiosity lighting up her eyes. The memory is not really one of his most pleasant ones, mixed into all the other crap that was going on at the time, the feelings of inadequacy and loss, but now he can’t help but grin widely at her anyway.

“Actually, it was Miranda’s stuff, but she had packed it herself and had just gone off to fetch the car. I wasn’t even in town at the time.”

It’s Gwen’s time to reach out and squeeze his arm. She doesn’t burst into tears as randomly as she did a few months back, but is still fully aware that sometimes reality is a whole lot easier to deal with than memories. You can do something about changing your reality, memories are here to stay, just as they are.

Blake turns to look at her, trying his best to shrug flippantly, keep the grin on his lips in place, but realizes that she must have heard something in his voice, in the little shaky sigh he wasn’t able to hold back, because she gives him a sad smile of understanding and the next moment has folded him into a big whole-body hug. He finds himself slipping his hands around her slender waist and clinging on for dear life, his nose buried into her blonde hair.

“Hey,” she whispers. “New, better life, remember?”

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Thanks for being there to remind me.” 

As he relaxes his grip around her, she presses a quick kiss to his cheek and then turns around in his arms. He is ready to let go of her completely but she grips his arms and brings them up to hold her around her shoulders, covering his hands with hers. She leans her head back, to rest against his shoulder, and Blake uses this position to graze her temple with a quick peck. 

That is how Adam finds them standing a little while later when he comes looking for them. In fact, at first he only spies Blake through the door to the living-room, his much larger body totally hiding Gwen’s. Adam is already on the porch when he realizes what is actually in front of him and by then it is already too late to sneak off.

“Hey,” he says instead. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I? It’s just that the house got really spooky quiet there all of the sudden.”

Gwen removes her hands from Blake’s and, reluctantly, he lets go of her, bracing himself for a moment before turning to Adam with a smirk firmly in place. 

“Nah, just goin’ through some local huggin’ rituals. You’re next.” And with that he steps behind Adam and grabs him into a hug that is more reminiscent of a head-lock. Gwen laughs out loud at the sight, though when Blake winks at her over Adam’s shoulder, her smile goes softer and more tender. Then she frowns, as if suddenly remembering something. She reaches out to her back pocket and pulls out her phone to check the time.

“I’d better go and check in with the boys before it gets too late and they are off to bed. I trust that you can keep your rituals from getting too rough within the next, say, half an hour?”

“I’m not promisin’ anything,” Blake declares and Adam emits a tortured growl. “Say hi to the kiddos from us.”

The second she is through the door, Blake lets go. Adam takes a moment to straighten his clothes and, looking up again, can’t help but let out a teasing snicker. His friend is still staring at the doorway, a particularly devastating puppydog look on his face.

“You know what all this looks like, don’t you?” Adam asks, patting Blake on the shoulder. 

“What?” Blake frowns in confusion.

“It looks like love.” Adam announces with a knowing nod. 

Blake scoffs, “Man, that’s not how these things work. It can’t be… well, that.” He waves his arm in a dramatic gesture.

“Why not? I mean, if it looks like love and, I’m guessing, feels like love, why can’t it be love?”

This conversation is starting to constrict Blake’s breathing a little. He is all for love, generally, but the different implications here are making his head spin. So he chooses to stick to the most plausible line of thinking.

“Come on, her marriage ended literally like just a minute ago. So did mine, for that matter.” A thought even more horrible than all previous ones occurs to him. “We can’t rebound with each other, she is too important to me for that.”

Adam tilts his head and looks at him like he is talking to a child.

“Who said anything about a rebound? I think,” he raises his finger and points at Blake, “instead of a rebound you did a purge back in July. I was there, remember? In case you need a refresher – I was the one feeding your dog, I was the one that kept your drunk ass from falling asleep in the bathtub and I was also the one who told you, like, fifteen thousand times that you weren’t a total failure and you most definitely weren’t done with love for good.” 

He had, indeed, been all those things and more. Blake had had to be in LA, for The Voice and other commitments, but if he’d had to go to that awful soulless rental where Miranda and he had only been using about three rooms out of, he would guess, fifty, he’d probably have offed himself the first night. So he, and his dog, had crashed at Adam’s for about a month or so and that is probably the sole biggest reason why he is still alive and sane today. Well, at least as sane as he was before.

Adam is not yet done, though. “And from the way that woman is looking at you, well, if I did not know for a fact that you are already writing her name over and over again in your notebook, with little hearts dotting the i’s, I’d be scared for you, to be quite honest. As it is, I think you’re one lucky bastard,” he gives Blake a pointed look. “Cause that woman, I think you have to agree with me, is quite something.”

Blake stuffs his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans, trying and failing to contain the goofy grin that threatens to break out on his face.

“She is. Almost everything,” he agrees. “You think there’s really something there?”

Tilting his head to the other side, dramatically putting his hand on his hip, Adam gives Blake his best “bitch, please!” expression. “The only question is, what are you going to do about it, man?”

Frowning thoughtfully, Blake takes a long look at the toes of his boots and then turns to stare at the doorway through which Gwen had left just moments ago.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, each and all. And especially you people. You know who you are... (pst, it's the ones who comment and offer kudos:)


	4. Getting caught in the rain*

When she looks back on all this later, she does realize that it must have happened gradually. Not only because these things usually do, but also because, looking back, she realizes that he must have been patiently laying down the track for her to get there, dropping breadcrumbs and reassurances that she was moving in the right direction. It must have happened over all those long phone conversations and cups of coffee handed to her when she most needed them and him pulling faces at Apollo until the kid fell over from giggling.

As it is, the realization catches her suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere. It is not unlike the time she found out that she was pregnant with Z – that this crazy amazing thing that you did not know that you wanted and wasn’t planning for at all has been evolving and growing in your life for a while now and somehow you weren’t even aware of it, and then you find out and momentarily it’s everything, it colors all your perceptions and the way you see the whole world around you. And of course she had known that she found Blake attractive, but it had always been sort of theoretical, more like she found Paul Newman circa 1975 attractive. The fact that she is actually seriously attracted to him, to the point of having embarrassing daydreams, hits her like a ton of bricks one afternoon when he has coaxed her into driving him somewhere again (because God forbid Mr. I-own-seven-trucks drive himself anywhere in LA) and the “Pina Colada Song” is on the radio and when the chorus comes on, he cranks it way up and sings along loudly, head bopping about, and as she turns her eyes towards him to take in the whole ridiculousness of it, he looks straight at her with the widest possible grin.

And it is all she can do not to drive straight off the road, because, hello, where did this come from.

Ever since then she has been trying to deal. Except, as history has shown, if you try to deal with these sorts of things too intensely, you end up driving yourself batshit crazy. To the point where you don’t really know what is real anymore. That, she thinks, is what happens to teen girls who manage to convince themselves that their love for the most popular boy in school is epic and as such cannot be one-sided – because it couldn’t possibly feel that intense if it were only you feeling it.

Not that she would let the word “love” anywhere near her thinking on this matter. It’s a crush, and a very inconvenient one as such because she is, well, too old for this and a mother of three and he is… too close.

They’ve all taken to watching the shows from the taped portion of the season at each other’s homes. Doing the live shows without seeing how the previous section was edited together and what their contestants actually looked and sounded like on camera is a bit tricky, but watching it all on one’s own would be too much of a drag. So the coaches form a sort of a support group, not unlike AA, except whatever is the exact opposite of anonymous (world famous?) and with alcohol.

This time it is one of the last Battle Round shows and Gwen’s house and they have been having a blast, eating dinner off the coffee table in front of the TV, occasionally throwing bread at the TV screen and their esteemed colleagues, at times offering genuinely helpful feedback and generally congratulating themselves and each other for the fact that this is what they get to do for a living. 

Except that Gwen has not been able to help fidgeting throughout the night. During the past week or so, ever since her groundbreaking revelation, her mind has done two full circles around itself and she has come to all sorts of interesting contradictory conclusions. Blake looks at her from across the room and it’s all sweaty palms and stomach doing flip-flops and a goofy grin she is actually having to physically hold back and at first she had thought that it was just her being a lunatic, but then it had started to seem more and more that it was really about the way he looked at her. So, maybe, not so lunatic after all and, oh God, how many weeks has she been smiling at him like an idiot, not even aware of it herself?

But then, wouldn’t they both be out of their minds and in for a world of heartbreak if they kept this up? What exactly about this scenario looks like a good idea? The balance she has finally managed to attain is still so delicate – work things keeping crazy personal stuff from becoming too overwhelming, everyday tasks holding her back from going down a creative wormhole. Would she lose herself again if she gave into this crazy powerful pull? Could she be happy if she didn’t?

Or is she still being a lunatic with an overactive imagination?

So when everybody is getting ready to leave, Gwen makes up her mind to get some clarity into this situation. She’s trying to figure out how to get Blake to stay behind for a moment without it looking too suspicious to Adam and Pharrell (she couldn’t take the juvenile, cheeky digs right now, not when they’d be hitting their mark way better than the guys would ever intend them to), but when the others stagger out in search of their Ubers, Blake lingers behind himself. He’s just about to lean in to give her cheek a kiss goodbye when she pulls back a bit and tilts her head, brow slightly furrowed. Blake gives her a questioning look.

“Hey,” she begins after a moment, “I guess I need to ask you something?”

He raises a confused eyebrow. “Ya guess?”

“I do,” she confirms. “You and I… There is something here, isn’t there? I just…,” she blurts out, then bites her bottom lip, “I need to know that I haven’t made it all up in my own head, just to make my life suck a bit less?”

Chin tucked, he looks up at her from under his lashes, eyes serious and searching, then nods. “You haven’t. It’s there.”

“Ok,” she says thoughtfully, even as she feels her heart starting to rise to her throat. “And doing something about it could be an epically bad idea, couldn’t it? There are just so many reasons why…” She looks down at their toes, then seeks out his eyes again, “I mean, we work together. And everybody is looking, all the telephoto lenses and cellphones. Not to mention that we both just got out of those really long relationships… The potential for it all blowing up in our faces…”

He winces, rubbing at his eyes with his long fingers, then gives her a sad smile. 

“Yeah, I suppose so…”

Pursing her lips, she shrugs and then lets out a heavy sigh. For a long moment he holds her gaze, then gives a tiny shake of his head and glances at the door.

“Blake, you are too important for me to…,” she tries to make it sound less calculated than it just did.

“Yeah, I know,” he sighs, clearly avoiding her eyes. Waving his hand towards the exit, he mutters, “I guess I’d better…” 

She is left staring at the heavy oak door as it closes behind him, her arms raising up to hug herself by their own volition. She finds it a bit hard to breathe. The twinge of heartache that comes is nothing new to her, she is just taken a bit by surprise by how much this hurts. It wasn’t real, this wasn’t a break-up. Was it? It had been just a pleasant thought to play around with at darker, lonelier moments, right? Then why doesn’t it feel that way at all?

The conversation, rather one-sided as it was, hasn’t even made things all that much clearer. Except for the part where she really isn’t a lunatic. But now what? How were they supposed to live with this? This conversation had already been a glimpse into how awkward things could get between them now and the thought of that sends another pang of regret through her chest. When was the last time in her life something was simple?

When the insistent knock comes on the door a few moments later, she is still so busy with her soul searching that she doesn’t even register it as something strange, doesn’t even quite consider the options to who it might be. 

She opens the door to a somewhat bewildered and out-of-breath Blake.

“So, here’s the thing,” he announces, leaning toward her. “All the stuff that you said is absolutely valid and true. I just really don’t give a damn.”

It is quite possible that she manages to let out a whimper before his lips are on hers, his arms encircling her waist and lifting her up from the ground. Her arms tightly around his neck, the thought that this feels like homecoming registers somewhere in the back of her mind. Something that has been coiled tight in her chest for so long that she had already forgotten that it was there suddenly unwinds and it is like she can breathe again, take in a whole lungful of this man she is holding.

“I’m such an idiot,” he manages to mumble against her lips, in between kissing her senseless right there in the lobby, the door still wide open behind him.

She leans back as much as she can in his embrace, frowning.

“Why’s that?”

He sets her down but still keeps his arms around her, smiling a crooked self-deprecating smile.

“I made myself a promise, a while back.” He gets distracted by the proximity of her lips for a moment, leaning in for another quick kiss. “I promised myself that the moment you acknowledged this thing between us, the moment you let me know that you felt it too, I would jump you.” They both grin at his attempt at sounding cool about it. “I just got turned around and off-track by all your sense and logic back there,” he now frowns. “Almost missed my chance. Didn’t quite get to the gate, though, before I regained my sanity.”

He had thought about it long and hard after he realized where this was headed back in Oklahoma. 

Figuring out what he wanted took him about a second. Blake didn’t even have to close his eyes to see her in his mind, a coy but brilliant grin on her face, her eyes shining at him. That’s what he wanted, all day every day, and everything that came with putting that grin on her face. Figuring out how to get there was a bit trickier. He’d been tempted to march up to her right then and there, but realized that, no matter what Adam had read into the way Gwen looked at him, she was not ready. She was not into mind games, not between two adults, not when it carried the chance of getting somebody hurt. So the fact that she had not acknowledged what was going on between them must have meant that she didn’t see it yet, that she was still too preoccupied with putting herself and her life back together. And rushing in now would just heap more pressure on her. He wanted to carry her burden, not add to it.

So he had resolved to wait it out. And be there, as a constant reminder of his constancy. So that when she would be ready, the moment she would be ready, she could walk into his waiting arms.

What he hadn’t counted on was that she would get there and hesitate, get all careful and sensible. That had, for a total of about three minutes, thrown him for a loop.

Now he is very interested in getting these three minutes back. He cups her cheek with a palm, ready to lean in again, but Gwen darts her head to the left and glances around his shoulder.

“The door,” she explains, giggling. “I am totally paranoid enough to think that somebody has drilled a peephole into that front gate and is already typing TMZ’s tipline address into their phone.”

With a mock startle, Blake straightens. “Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean it’s not true,” he announces with exaggerated understanding and turns to close the door.

When he turns back around again, Gwen is looking at him with a curious smile. “A while back, huh?”

“Oklahoma,” he shrugs bashfully.

“I admire your confidence,” she gives him an appreciative nod. “I was clueless back then.”

“I know,” he smirks. “That’s why I didn’t jump you back then.”

Gwen throws her head back in laughter, “Sorry, but you can’t really pull that expression off, babe.”

“Babe, huh?” he laughs back, stalking closer to her again. “I guess that means we’re done bein’ sensible?”

“I guess so,” she agrees and reaches out her hand to pull him towards her quicker. At the same moment his lips touch hers, he bends down and scoops her in his arms, carrying them back to the living room.

A while later, after kissing and talking and some more kissing (and talking about how comparing them to teenagers experimenting with intimacy wouldn’t be all that inaccurate, seeing how long it had been since either of them tried to start these things from the beginning), lying down on the huge overstuffed couch, limbs tangled and clothes slightly astray, in between soft slow, increasingly sleepy pecks all over each other’s faces, he asks her about when it was that she stopped being clueless.

“That Pina Colada song will never be the same for me,” she chuckles, pressing her face against his neck. It takes Blake a moment to remember what she is talking about.

“Hah!” he laughs out. “For a moment there I thought you were havin’ a stroke while drivin’! Never had that effect on a girl before.”

“Come on, babe, have you seen yourself?” Gwen tries to inject some admonition into her voice, but finds that she is entirely too happy, not to mention comfortable stretched out pressed into his side. “I am pretty sure that you have had that effect and worse.”

“Sweetheart,” he drawls out, “you, all this,” he slides his palm down her back, slipping the other one into her hair, “does wonders to a man’s ego.” He shifts to be able to fully kiss her again. “And soul,” he mutters against her lips.

*

When they wake up, it isn’t quite light outside yet. They’re both slightly stiff, Blake’s hand has somehow made it underneath her shirt and there’s an obvious half-mast hard-on jammed against her thigh. He presses a kiss into her messed up hair, unfathomably proud that he is responsible for the mess, and to that Gwen stretches. His hand slides down her bare back, making her shiver for an instant.

“Hmmm,” she mumbles, voice rough from sleep, “can’t remember the last time I woke up like this…”

“What,” he mumbles back, “all stiff with some dude’s hand up your shirt and his mornin’ w…”

“Yeah, that,” she laughs, leaning up to kiss him quickly on the lips. When he shifts to capture hers more fully she tries to evade (“Ugh, morning breath!”) but Blake doesn’t let her and a moment later she, too, has more important things on her mind already.

“I think I have to go, love,” he says regretfully after a minute. “We have to be at the studio in a few hours and if I show up in the same shirt as yesterday, only lookin’ as if I’ve spent the night rollin’ around in it, we’ll never hear the end of it from Adam.”

“Yeah,” she agrees and drags herself up from the couch, only to be yanked back into his lap a second later. “I think my housekeeper is about to step through that front door any moment now, anyway. Wouldn’t want to give her another shock, she’s had to put up with quite a lot this year.”

Blake lifts a palm to stroke her hair, fixing his sleepy eyes on hers and taking a deep breath. “God, you’re beautiful,” he sighs.

“Am not,” she ducks her head. “I am a woman who slept in her make-up. Whatever of it you didn’t manage to kiss off last night.”

“And you’ve never been more beautiful,” he announces, lifting her chin. “Which is quite a feat, considerin’ that I already thought that you were the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.”

“Argh,” he groans when several minutes slip by again, his lips glued to hers, “vicious circle. I’m gonna go now or I never will.”

She walks him to the door and they almost get distracted by another bout of making out against the hallway wall, but manage to pull themselves together as the fully grown adults they are.

Giving her the last peck on the lips on the open door, he gets a cheeky grin on his face when he asks her in parting, “D’ya think the paps are dedicated enough to sit in the bushes in front of your gate at 5:30 in the mornin’ on a weeknight?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *The Pina Colada Song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eyaf1yMHx54
> 
> Paul Newman circa 1975 http://www.lassothemovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/a6.jpg
> 
> Excuse me for the fluff, but we all knew it was coming. You know how to get in touch with me :)


	5. Epilogue to the story/Prologue to life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's taken a bit longer than intended, but I am really happy that I was able to complete this final installment of the story. All I can say is that if you really, really find reading this long thought process of Gwen's too much of a drag, I hope that you'll at least just skip over to the last third of the chapter (starting from the asterisk) to get the ending to the story, and the necessary closure, as I always intended it.

_Some time in December, 2015_

The soft wind is creating ripples on the dimly lit pool downstairs.

She quietly steps on the balcony overlooking the back yard, slides the door closed with a small click and gathers herself up on the settee, wrapping the shawl tightly around her. Supporting her cheek on the knees she’s hugging, she takes a deep breath and lets the rhythmic movement of the water below hypnotize herself for a moment.

It’s 3 a.m. and she is up and her life is overflowing, there’s just so much of it that she decided to take a moment and try to absorb it all.

The past month or so has been out of this world crazy. There’s been a gazillion pictures taken of her, of every step that she takes, and it seems that on most of them she is wearing this stupid dazed soft grin. It doesn’t, at least in her opinion, leave much room for speculation, especially considering that most of the time there is another person, with a matching goofy expression, standing right next to her.

But speculation there has been. All manner of fantastic theories and batshit crazy “facts”. 

She has not really been in any hurry to explain herself or set any sort of records straight and, even though she tries really hard not to let that stuff affect her in any way, it seems that everybody and their mother now has an opinion on her most personal relationships, an opinion they are not at all shy about expressing, and she is just left wondering when the hell did she invite all these people into her life. If it’s really, like, some sort of a tacit agreement she has concluded in exchange for them going through the trouble of listening to her music, or even just knowing who she is.

Confirming the relationship had, admittedly, totally backfired. 

But some triggerhappy asshole had taken blurry pictures of them at Adam’s Halloween party and they had totally had a kneejerk reaction. They’d thought that if they confirm something, the bare minimum of something, really (“we are kinda, sorta dating a bit”), it might save them from having to sneak around like some teenaged Hollywood socialites, which, they’d both agreed, would have been even more of a drag than the occasional tightlipped smile at the paps. Two people, going about their relationship in a most remarkably undramatic manner couldn’t possibly hold their attention for too long, they’d thought. 

Well, that’d been a major miscalculation, but the rookie mistake could totally be put down to the fact that neither of them had had anything of this sort to confirm in literally more than ten years. Adam, with his string of different pouty models to not confirm before he got his act together with Behati, was especially astounded and amused by their heavy-handed approach. (“Man, why’d you have to say anything? Just go about your stuff and, like, giggle or, you know, smile enigmatically or something when they ask. They’re gonna write crazy shit about you anyway.”)

It seems silly, to have to play these sorts of charades with straight-up facts of life, but in the ass-backwards world of Hollywood, a little pretend and bold-faced lies make things literally so much simpler.

And in the end all the tabloid stuff is just… Well, she supposes that somebody probably makes money every time they claim that she is expecting another alien baby or is about to have a shotgun wedding even before her previous divorce is final (or is feuding with her boyfriend’s ex – like, when would she even have the time for something like that?). And even though for her, personally, money in itself does not seem like enough of a motivation to mess with other people’s lives like that, she can see how it could be for other people. (She can also see how she might not be in the best position to judge other people’s need or ambition for money.)

She is, quite frankly, more thrown by the petty, prejudiced and judgmental crap people spew with the dumb excuse that it is their right to express their opinion. 

The “they’re so different, I don’t get it, it can’t work” variety of objections is the relatively innocent kind. If she were the type to need to justify her personal choices to the world, she’d could just tell these people that they are dead wrong. To judge the content of a person by the clothes that they wear is the most clichéd and superficial kind of shallowness. 

Where it counts, at the core of things, she and Blake are so totally similar – the most important things to them both, pretty much the only things that really matter, are music and family. Not even necessarily in that order. 

But there are those that have taken it a step or two further. 

Somebody forwarded her an article from one of those girl power sites that basically called her a sell-out of the feminist cause, because she started dating Blake. And that shit just made her head spin a little. 

Because, for one, she is just a woman living her life the best she can and if that inspires somebody, well, excellent, rad, but she is not about to put her personal choices through some “What would a feminist icon do?” (WWAFID, if you like) test and, like, eject people from her life when they don’t quite come up to the jezebel.com standard for one reason or another.

And, also, even more importantly, the boy might have a bit of a problem with impulse control and filter (he is getting better at saying things out loud to himself just to hear how they actually sound before putting them out there, though), but Blake would never, ever intentionally do something to hurt her. He would never try to bring her down just because he has had a bad day or because he is worried about his career going nowhere or because he’s turning fifty and is afraid that he is “turning into Mick Jagger” (because he is English and a rocker and old, get it?). To that she had wanted to tell Gav that he might be many things, but he’s certainly no Mick Jagger. She’d held herself back, though, because that would have opened up a whole other conversation about her not believing in him and not supporting him. Blake would never try to change her or make her feel like she wasn’t enough.

And, it seems to her, _that_ should be the kind of guy and _those_ should be the relationship goals for every budding feminist and strong, independent girl out there.

As to the other side of things, she is not quite sure she will ever even truly understand the way this whole insular country music world works. She’s met some of his friends and they have been nothing but nice and supportive, but from what she has gathered, there is, like, a whole army of people who consider Blake a sell-out of his own right, simply for straying out of his musical genre (and maybe, possibly, just zip code) with her. 

They seem to think that she will change him, forbid him to eat steak and put him in vegan leather and skinny jeans or something. She has absolutely no interest in that and it boggles her mind that someone would even think that she would.

For her whole life, since she can remember, she has had such a strong sense of personal style that she has always felt extremely protective about, so even the idea that she should start dictating somebody else’s choices to them is totally foreign to her. Which means that if her sons want to go to Sunday Mass in cowboy boots and a neon green basketball uniform, more power to them. 

And maybe at some point she will point out to Blake that all his clothes are at least a couple of sizes too big for him. Or maybe she won’t, as really, most of the time the main interest she has in his clothes is how to get him out of them.

And then there are the people, hidden behind more or less anonymous social media accounts, who see her as the symbol of the end to everything that is good and beautiful and righteous in this world.

The negative comments don’t really bother her. She’d figured out a long time ago that if somebody used 140 characters to hate her for her mere existence, it couldn’t really be about her. She takes the positive, because people usually have reasons for liking her and often those reasons, even if not quite valid, are rather uplifting, but the blind vitriol of complete strangers has no place in her pretty full schedule.

It bothers Blake though, to the point where she has had to strongly suggest that he took a step back from social media. That opinion had only been strengthened when she discovered that for the past few years, at astoundingly tight intervals, he has been tweeting that he’s playing with himself. She had almost been tempted to ask whether he was actually masturbating when he posted those tweets, taking a quick moment during his activities to reach for his phone, but had realized that this would be a conversation that could get out of hand really easily.

She knows why Blake is so bothered, though. He feels responsible for the attacks. He thinks that it’s his divorce drama, his status in his own world that has brought them about, ironically enough largely due to the fact that both he and Miranda have refused to publicly point fingers. Watching Blake’s expression getting more and more tight as he had scrolled down his phone screen, she had realized that this was the only thing that truly upset her about the people thoughtlessly stirring up this juvenile drama – the fact that it got him so upset. 

It couldn’t have been fun for Miranda, either, wherever she was, and it had made her wonder if all those fundamentalist fans were even aware how much they could be hurting the people they claimed to care for so much – like, every time they tagged Miranda into some hateful rant about Blake and his choices in life, they would also drag his new relationship into his ex-wife’s life. Moving on, even if all sides have accepted that the relationship is definitely totally over is hard enough – if you have loved somebody for such a long time, for so many reasons, if you have made space for that person in every little part of your life, well, that love doesn’t just end at a moment’s notice, even if your trust and confidence in that person does. It’s a process of letting go, of carefully extricating who you are on your own from the entity that you were together.

A small gust of wind blows across the balcony. She pulls the shawl tighter around herself and also adjusts the big white dress shirt she had thrown on when she snuck out of the bedroom. Tilting her head to the side, she catches the whiff of his scent from the corner of its collar and smiles.

The smile is not only about the memories and images that smell, deep and woodsy and masculine, conjures up, but also about how far she has come. It has been a crazy, confusing, painful, necessary and ultimately wonderful year and the biggest, most important thing to come out of all of that is that she has found herself again. She has found her talent and her confidence and her beauty. 

She can write music again and after such a long time of having to force it and the nagging, power-zapping dissatisfaction, it’s as if every single day in the studio, whether the songs are happy or sad or vengeful or life-affirming, is giving her wings. Like, she is literally floating low on the ground.

And, after some flailing about and uncertainty, she is finally totally at home in her own body again, feels like each cell and fiber of it is her own again, a manifestation of who she truly is. Her make-up, bold and elaborate, had always been just another way for her to express herself and her creativity, but at some point during the past years it had started to feel more like a mask. Putting it on had started to feel like a chore and the knowledge of that somehow made her even more sad, the covering up of which required even more make-up. She has now come the full circle, and for the first time in ages she finds that she can wear it or not, depending on what she wants it to say – that it is an expression again, not a means to hide.

And if she has found some of that confidence and beauty, some of the music that she is writing, even, in the look in somebody else’s eyes, then all the more wonderful. The boy came into her life way sooner, with way more force than she would have ever expected, but she was so ready for it without even knowing it herself. Because it was him, big and steady and up for it all. He is not something that she has to find or make space for in her life. He just fits, makes everything bigger and better and brighter.

*

If the night weren’t as calm and quiet, she might have completely missed the click and swoosh of the balcony door being slid open. As it is, she lifts her head and looks toward it.

The next moment she blinks hard and „Goddammit,“ is the only thought that goes through her head. When a smug, if sleepy smirk spreads across his face, she realizes that she must have actually said it out loud. But really, what’s a girl to do when faced with a vision like that – her boyfriend, all 6’5 of him, salt-and-pepper scruff covering his chin and his wavy mop creating the textbook definition of bed hair, eyes hooded by sleep and clad only in a white cotton sheet loosely wrapped low around his hips.

She isn’t really in the habit of comparing the two men in her life (for in her life Gavin would remain, for the rest of their days) as there isn’t really much of an overlap. But now she has to contend that on Gavin, a getup like that would look… staged. On Blake, everything is natural.

Letting out a small happy giggle, Gwen takes her time to appreciate the sight of him.

“Babe,” she finally says, taking a deep breath, “as much as it pains me to say this, it’s December and we’re not on a tropical island!”

“I know, so you’d better get back in here before I freeze my balls off,” he quips, moves closer to her and whisks her up from the chair. His palms are cupping her ass and her arms and legs automatically tie themselves around him.

“Lovely,” she mutters, grinning from ear to ear.

“Ain’t I just?” he guffaws back, stepping them back into the house and sliding the door closed again behind him. Walking the few steps to the bedroom, he raises an amused eyebrow to her, “So what were you doin’ out there, anyway? Thinkin’ up ways to dump my ass?”

Gwen throws her head back, laughing. “Well, if I was, coming after me looking like that certainly changed my mind. Or at least completely distracted me. Well played, cowboy.”

She can feel the rumble of his laughter in the chest pressed up against hers.

The moment they reach the bedroom, Blake unceremoniously deposits her on the bed, himself remaining standing at the foot of it, hands on his hips. Looking down at her, laid out in front of him in nothing but his own white dress shirt that he had haphazardly discarded somewhere on the floor earlier in the evening, he lets his eyes roam up and down her body, a soft smile grazing his lips. He blinks hard, then fixes his gaze firmly to her eyes and says,

“Gosh, I love you.”

This is the first time that he has said it out loud, but she has felt it coming from him for weeks, has basked in his love every time she has looked over to him and found him staring at her with a dumb smile on his face, every time she has felt his hand reach out to her, interlacing their fingers as if it’s the most natural thing to do. Because she doesn’t really need the words, they carry none of the usual anxiety of getting them out, of hearing them, for the first time. Because she is so secure in what they have being the most real thing, she can feel a huge dumb smile of her own starting to build somewhere in her chest, then breaking out on her face as she says,

“Good.”

Blake grins back at her, clearly amused, and his confidence is so damn sexy that it slightly steals her breath just looking at him. Blake has his insecurities, like any other person, but she is so happy to see that he has none when it comes to her.

“Really?” he asks, quirking an eyebrow. “Good? That’s how you choose to play this?”

“Yeah,” she nods, shifting closer to him on the bed. “Good. Excellent, even.” She reaches out and tugs on the sheet he’s still wearing. It comes off easily and she lets it drop on the floor as Blake, now naked in front of her in all his glory, gives her another burning glance and then bends down to her, splaying his palm on her stomach and sliding it up painfully slowly, on the way flicking his thumb to open the single button keeping the shirt closed.

A little while later, when their slow sensuous kisses and intertwined legs and exploring hands and bodies touching in just the right places have built up the heady passion, just as he is ready to enter her, she ties a hand around his neck, draws his ear close to her lips and says, clearly and quietly,

“Love you more.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading. Here's to hoping that these two will keep doing what they have been doing so well thus far!


End file.
